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2.1. Web history: past and future

2.1.1 Functionally: How the web has been used?

There is a huge gap between "what the web has been created for" and "how the web has been used". The web has been truly built on one man's vision: Tim Berners Lee. We can't sincerely talk about internet without talking about Tim. Reading Weaving the web, the book where Tim (yes, I'll keep naming him Tim) relates web's creation, has been a great experience for me, it shows how technology can serve ideology. This man fights for his ideas, a vision of what the web should be, and all his choices are focused to realise his dream.

Unfortunately his dream of a web 'where we have limitless choice because we don't have to take what the TV producer has decided we should see next' (Berners Lee 1999:182) wasn't really shared and understood.

First web sites were really weak, copying old medias, creating one-to-many communications, without any interactivity. Try out archive.org and use "the take me back" button, you'll be in pain if you are looking before 2000 for blogs (2004 blogs became mainstream)(Wikipedia Blog), video sharing (Youtube founded in 2005) or social networking (LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster are 2003).

All the interactive tools and services have been founded more than ten years after web creation.

But when you are reading "Weaving the web", wrote in 1999 with thoughts 1990 aged, you can read:

My hope and faith that we are headed somewhere stem in part from the frequently proven observation that people seem to be naturally built to interact with others as part of a greater system... Computers help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration... If intercreativity is not just sitting there passively in front of a display screen, then intercreativity is not just sitting there in front of something "interactive".

(Berners Lee 1999:224)

Tim's ideas have passed the dot com bubble, waiting more than ten years, and finally web 2.0 came out. It shouldn't be called web 2.0 but simply "THE web".

But don't be too much delighted at that news, like I said web is still a teenager and isn't mature yet.

Nevertheless, THE web has already transformed our world, information is now free and everywhere, we are always connected (sooner or later at 100%) and everyone produces on internet.

This figure shows the new structure of the Web:

Figure 1. Web 2.0 Meme Map (O'Reilly 2005:1)

Ok, functional revolution is on the move but what about the web's core? This isn't the same deal...

2.1.2. Technically: How the web has been built?

When you are looking at the web's history you realise that internet has always been a field of war. Every company has tried to control the web, ISPs controlling navigation and browsers defining their own standards. In the middle of the field, referee Tim (always him), and the W3C crew have tried to organize this mess, pretty successfully and at the end nobody has won this battle. But the war isn't finished yet.

The result of these fights is that the web has not really changed technically since its creation. HTML became XHTML and CSS is now used quite everywhere, so now content and presentation are separated. Nothing really exciting indeed...

What about RSS? One of the most valuable creations of the web 2.0! It has been created in 1995 and it also took ten years to be widely implemented and used (Wikipedia RSS).

And Ajax? This technology uses only HTML+DOM+XMLHttpRequest (Javascript) and all of them have been created before the dot-com bubble.

The good thing is that all these technologies are now pretty mature and the web is ready to be upgraded, but what for?

2.1.3. A taste of what the web will be

No doubt that the web called 2.0 is on the good way, web has never been so democratized, and surfers' behaviours are closer to Tim's vision than ever.

This dissertation will not attempt to predict the future but there is clear evidence that the web is entering into a new phase, structuring its communities and services.

It seems that the next big step would be the appearance of a new technology. No it won't be RIAs, or 3Ds, or any complex and weird user interface.

Internet still needs more accessibility and operability before becoming more complex. Web pages are richer enough; we mustn't widen the gap separating healthy people from people with disabilities (20% of population). So what is it? And if Tim had the answer (damn Tim, always him)...

The Semantic Web (W3C 2001) could bring us in a new era, a web of data, an unending set of databases which are connected, a web machine-understandable, a better web for a better world, Tim's web.